Learning from your competitor – your first step towards marketing success

Getting a peek into your competitor’s online activities helps!

Marketing your business and its offerings to your target customers is critical to its success. Creating awareness about your business offerings is not an option but an absolute necessity for your survival as an entrepreneur.

You might already be aware of this truth, but where do you start? Today there are a thousand options and channels to promote and market a product, advertising, public relations, trade shows, SEO, SEM, Social Media – the list is getting denser everyday and  so is the confusion.

A quick search on the net will throw-up a lot of unsolicited advice from various experts and bloggers, including me – but how do you know, what will work best for your kind of business?

Bingo!! the answer is simple – see what your competitors are doing. Agree or not – today online marketing is an aspect companies can rarely ignore, in fact there are companies who market themselves only on the Internet channels. And in the realm of the internet there are no hidden secrets..

In the offline world keeping a tab on your competitors and their activities can cost you a bomb, you might have to hire an agency to monitor your competitor activities to know on how they are promoting their business. Online this can actually be done for free, with the help of some tactics and tools. Thanks to the search engines like Google, Yahoo and others – our footprints online are all securely stored in their huge databases and its legal to access them

In a two part blog series I will cover two aspects of doing competitor analysis, answering two very important questions – Part I -Why do it? and Part II- How to do it?

Part I -Competitor analysis – Why do it ?

Competitor analysis can help you and your short – staffed marketing team in many ways.

1. Clears the confusion

If you think your competitor is doing better than you, when it comes to creating awareness and brand recall, then this is the best way to check out the channels they are using, the influencers they are engaging with, the directories they are promoting themselves on and more.

You and your competitors have similar offerings and the customer profiles you want to reach out to, is also quite similar – in such case, a competitor analysis can give you a head start on the areas you need to cover to reach your potential customer base. Channels you can use, websites you can use for advertising your product, media you can use to pitch your product story to, social media channels used by your target segment and ways to engage them.

This is the best way to get information on tried and tested methods that work for your industry. You will have all the info you want, without actually digging the dirt yourself.

2. Gives you Direction

How did your competitor Launch their product, what story angles did they pitch to the media, what kind of messaging did they use for their ads, all is great information to have, especially if you and your team are new to this space.

Hiring an agency or a marketing professional does not always solve the problem – to give instructions and get the best out of your vendors – you yourself need to know what you want for your business.

Going through your competitor’s body of marketing work – will give you a lot of idea on how you want to position your offerings in the market, which are the product features you will highlight to establish your supremacy. Most importantly, it will tell you how to showcase yourself differently from those already existing in your market.

3. Provides you with a Benchmark

From day one – you will know what you are up against, where do your competitors stand and the brand recall they enjoy. This will help you in setting your own goals, it could be anything acquiring x number of customers in next 12 months or increasing the number of coverages by x numbers for your company in the next 6 months or acquiring a higher ranking for a critical keyword on google in next 3 months, whatever be your goal or set of goals – competitor analysis can provide you with a benchmark for success – vis -a-vis your competitor.

But before you start analyzing your competitor’s body of work – remember competitor analysis should not be used to blindly ape what your competitor is doing. If you do that – you are bound to jeopardize the future of your business.

No two business’ are the same, the set of people driving them are not the same and the talent pool at each ones disposal is not the same – hence it is good to be realistic in your approach – competitor analysis should only be used as a guidance for your own marketing plan. It helps you do away with the ambiguity and provides you with a set of actionable items for your  plan – which should be customized as per the needs of your own business.

To know how to do competitor analysis and how to keep a constant tab on your competitor for more useful insights – watch out this space for my post next week – Part II – Competitor analysis – How to do it?

iPitch : Apple's Media Spin!!

Apple launched its iPad this week and made the media across the world go into a tizzy. The buzz that followed the launch was any PR professional’s dream come true – every one had something to say about the new Apple product.

7000 Apple tweets per minute during iPad announcement.

Thousands of technology journalists and bloggers across the World hooked to every word Steve Jobs had to say about his latest offering and a front page headline on most publications across the World.

A quick search on Google – is enough to showcase the media frenzy Apple unleashed with its recent product launch.

Over 6 Million coverages for its iPad is currently visible on the search engine of which more than 330,000 are mentions in blogs from all over…

Am I then surprised to hear a fellow tweeter tweet – “I would love to join the PR team of Apple – it is the easiest job on Earth.”

Looking at all the eyeballs Apple manages to get and all the tongues it sets rolling, I feel like agreeing with my tweet buddy. iPod, iPhone and now the iPad each outdid the other in terms of media coverage.

As a company Apple has always been tight lipped, which has worked for it in many ways. Speculations about its tablet PC were rife in the market, videos of its tablet PC were available on YouTube for over a month before the launch, yet it could not diminish the curiosity of the technology buffs and managed to take all by surprise.

While I would like to believe all this interest in Apple and its products is because of the great work and efforts put in by their marketing and communications team – in truth it’s not their doing, at least not ‘just’ their doing.

The real credit goes to the people behind the products Apple launches. They have managed to establish themselves as the creators of the most desirable products in the World – known for their cutting edge technology and exclusiveness, which every time manages to change the course of future technology.

Very rarely do you see the pride of owning a branded gadget like that among the Apple users.

Cynics can debate that despite the technology they were down in the dumps and almost on the verge of closure before they re-created themselves with the iPod, and yes there is truth in that – but then iPod was a success because of its technology and the way it managed to capture the imagination of music lovers all over.

Public Relations as a profession is a lot about creating that feel good fluff around your clients and their products, but for it to really make a mark it is important that the product in itself is good, of high quality and one which finds favor among its users.

At the end of the day, if the user experience is compromised, then how much ever good you write about it – the truth will finally find its way out.

Public Relations as a profession is a lot about creating that feel good fluff around your clients and their products, but for it to really make a mark it is important that the product in itself is good, of high quality and one which finds favor among its users.

At the end of the day, if the user experience is compromised, then how much ever good you write about it – the truth will finally find its way out.

I wouldn’t like to undermine the role PR professionals can play in creating the hype and building a company’s brand reputation – after all it’s my bread and butter.

But the truth is even if I were the best PR person in the World, with the best of media relations I would not be able to build the hype and keep it going if, the end product I was promoting was not good enough.

That is where Apple makes a mark. Its products and their users speak on its behalf. Apple believes in making – the ownership of an Apple product an experience. From the way Steve Jobs launches a product to the way Apple stores market it – everything is about experience.

UTalkMarketing Editor, Clark Turner quotes, “Tim Greenhalgh, a PR consultant at Liberate Media in his post, “No one does desire like Apple, and no one presents desire as well as Steve Jobs.”

Apple iPad

Good or bad, every time Apple launches its products – it creates something that is desirable by millions around the planet. And when millions want information on something – there will be thousands who would seek to provide them.

Publicizing Truth – Stranger Than Fiction!!!

What I discuss in today’s post may seem insignificant and even repetitive– but it is important. Important because unless we look within and find faults with what we do and how we do, we will never improve. I hope my personal insight helps you find some relevant answers as well……

In the business of perception building – faking is often a given. From revolutionary products that promise to change the world to those who claim to reverse your aging process – we have seen and heard it all.

As consumers, we are wary of such claims but as professionals, we still find it difficult to stay away from making such world changing declarations. 

I guess exaggeration is a given when it comes to marketing, advertising or public relations, but today we all find the distinction between reality and perception getting lost in a web of words and images. 

Have you ever stopped to think, why is it that most PR professionals no matter which stream, nation or community they belong to suffer from this obsessive compulsive disorder? Use of baseless adjectives like – state-of –art, one-of- its- kind, revolutionary, life-changing etc. have become part and parcel of our common vocabulary to describe something as normal and common as a pen drive to a driving car. 

The reason could be many from the clients we work for, to the consumers we cater to or the media web we have created where only the tallest claim manages to draw attention and stand out…..

Whatever the reasons, the need of the hour is to reinvent ourselves into professionals who promote truth, build perceptions that are real and market stuff for what it is really worth. 

It could seem like a tough call, but in truth, it is the best policy to follow in the long run.

To start you can try some of these time tested methods, which might help in changing the way you do Public Relations..

• Be truthful and objective when analyzing your client and his competitors.

 

• Find what’s the unique selling point or the differentiating factor between your client and his competitors and see how best you can use it to market him. It could be anything from his offering, to the quality of his offering, to the market segment he wants to target or his approach. It is for you to find out, and to package it effectively without manipulating.

 

•  Be truthful to your client. He is passionate about his business and can often lose sight of reality, he has hired you to give him your expert advice – so don’t shy away from giving him a reality check and showing him the real value for his product/offering. This also helps in setting the expectations right at the beginning – for both parties.      The client understands his product is not going to replace Google overnight and you will know – it could take a lot more effort to create the buzz  than you were initially made to believe. Trust me, clients value such consultants, because only when you are passionate about something will you fight for its good in the long run.

 

• Be creative. There are many creative ways of saying the same thing without actually faking or promising things that don’t exist or your client’s product cannot deliver.

 

• Be truthful with your analysis and plan. If you know from experience that the client’s offering is not going to get him any regular PR initially – then tell him so – to start with he will have to do some paid PR and focus on other aspects of marketing to get some attention and brand recall, before he can expect some genuine media attention to come his way. It is fine! It does not show less on your capabilities as long as you provide him with good alternatives; in fact, it shows you believe in being honest. Every CEO dreams of giving an interview on BBC or CNN – well the fact is very few make the cut, even if they are backed by the best agency!   We all know marketing is a mix of using paid and non-paid channels – for each the ratio and budget of spends varies depending on what they are trying to market.

 

• Before you go out and talk about your client and his products in the media or to his customers – Study it well. ‘Believe in what you are trying to sell.’ If you don’t believe in the virtues of your client’s offering, there is no way you can convince another person on how great a product it is. In other words, when you are truthful about a product, your passion to drive the product is visible to the world. It is quite similar to what you do when you find this great place downtown – you make sure all your friends check it out too.

The benefits of being truthful in your PR campaigns are many, to start with you will spend less time convincing a journalist or a consumer that your product is really, really revolutionary!!

Journalists, bloggers and consumers all at some point or the other have stated, they are tired of this fad, which fails to die down.

For the change to set in, we as professionals need to realize that we are not miracle makers but mediators of information between a brand and its users. To be true to ourselves, our profession and our clients, all we require is to put forward the truthful information in the best possible manner.